In April 2006 AniOnline was created and then slowly died off. Join us as we mourn the loss of AniOnline on it's 10th anniversary.

Forum rules
AniOnline is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental. Any names or identities that may reference real people are purely fictional or exaggerated.

The content of this story is intended for mature audiences. Some themes and elements may not be suitable for everyone. Viewer discretion is advised.

I restructured the site to better suit it's needs. First, I gave you all Veteran status because you're old as shit by this point. Also, Veteran status has been redefined to be anyone that has any history with the old Ani. You might be missing some permissions, but you can change your default group status in the UCP, unless it's broken. If it is broken let me know. Emailing me is the best way to get my attention. If you want to join the esteemed Privileged users group, which has access to all our forums (well, except Net Slums), don't apply to join the group in the ucp. The fastest way to join is to contact me directly. I have a Twitter and Steam, but I'm rarely ever on them. The best way to contact me can be from the following:

I thought about PMing this to you, but just in case you can't get into your account for whatever reason.

If you have any issues with a particular NPC in the story, let me know what you want done, whether that be a name change or an extensive character redesign, and I'll get to it as quickly as possible. Shit is complicated, but I'll explain everything if you want to know what happened.

If you've NEVER EVER heard of AniOnline or whatever the heck I'll eventually rename it to, then this is addressed to you.

Hi, I'm SquareoftheLightOnes. I'm the writer and co-artist behind AniOnline, a combination of written fiction and webcomic based on the online avatar role-play community of the same name from 2006. It was created by a college programmer under the username "Leo" and modeled after GaiaOnline. The little Maplestory-looking guy to the left is what our avatars looked like. They were small enough that we could make little vehicles and robots for them to drive around in and it was super cool. The site went by a different name for most of its life, but you don't need to know about that. I've long since abandoned its old name anyway.The AniOnline in front of you now is a modern fantasy based on the storyline and lore my friends and I wrote for the site, and uses php Bulletin Board software to recreate the early 2000s play-by-post roleplays that the story is based on. Imagine an MMORPG, but set in an anime world where people are just as batshit insane as they are on the internet. How does society function like this? Read the story and find out!

This is all mostly experimental. Play-by-post roleplay has existed for over a decade, but no one's ever used a bulletin board to tell an entire over-aching story before (as far as I know). I've had to modify the source code in order to achieve everything I need the site to do. A single user can have a different avatar for any of their posts. Some users can even change their usernames in individual posts, and others get special formatting applied to their posts all for the sake of roleplay and storytelling. I added an RNG to posting to add a tabletop roleplay element where the dice tell the story. Some of you may already know where this idea came from, and it's possibly the most effective idea ever implemented with Ani. Some of the funniest and scariest moments have been decided by the RNG gods.

You'll also notice all of the characters have [NPC] before their names. This is because, on the old AniOnline, they were all non-player characters that would interact with the userbase. Hopefully if Ani becomes as big as I hope it to be, maybe these characters will get to interact with some of you on the site. As cool an idea as that sounds, even I don't know if it'll actually work.All the artwork is produced by both me and another artist. The illustrations or "comic panels" in the story have been purposefully half-assed to help speed up the story's production, and even with that it took me a whole damn year just to finish three episodes. If I put actual effort into them it would unfortunately take even longer. The reason the avatars don't have the same problem in quality is because they're modular and we can re-use assets as needed.

If you're still wondering why this forum is called "10th Aniversary", it's because AniOnline is technically over 10 years old now. Originally this story was meant to be a collection of short, fan-service stories for some of my old friends from the site, but recently it's starting to migrate away from that and become its own thing. Now it's become sort of a pilot story arc where I try to cram as many world-building and future story ideas as I can. If the story feels like an unorganized mess, that's why. You probably have no idea who Naru is or why you should care about her, and there's no way for you to know her unless you were part of the tiny community her character comes from, and even then she was rarely if ever used despite being our freaking mascot. Regardless, I have faith that you don't really need to know that much about her and you'll slowly figure stuff out as the story unfolds.This story is not just practice for me to write long, over-arching stories but a work in-progress as well. If something in the story doesn't work, feels awkward, and is of no consequence to change then I go back and edit stuff I've already written. This could become a nightmare for anyone who's actively keeping up with the story, but hopefully what I write will become more concrete the better I become as a writer. The most important thing for me right now is feedback. If you like what little you get from the story, let me know. If you don't like something or think there's a glaring plot issue, let me know. If you think this story is the shittiest thing you ever read and you can totally write circles around me with better characters and better world building, let me know... you know, so long as you give me a reason why you don't like it or think it could be better. Don't be a shitter.

Also, this story can kinda get graphic in some places, so it's intended for mature audiences only. I'm pretty sure there's a law that states you have to have some kind of pop-up on a site for stuff like that, so I'll add one after writing this. Just to be safe I might either hide graphic content in spoiler tags or not display the images. (though I might keep a link to them but in white-text. You'll just have to dig a little to find them)

This thread is open to comments if you have an account, but Imma be honest with you, you don't really need to register an account. You can always contact me from the following:

We're located on a shared hosting domain because I can't afford to host the site myself. It hasn't been a problem since the story doesn't take up a lot of server space. However, the site gets a monthly bandwidth allowance, and when it exceeds that allowance it shuts down until the beginning of the next month. If this story is the best thing you've ever read and you gotta tell everyone about it!... maybe just hold on and wait for a second because that could unintentionally DDOS the site, and then no one will get to read for two or three weeks.

Anyway that's it hope you like it and i don't know how to end this post BYYYYYYYYYYYYEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE